Edith W. Clowes
University of Virginia (Lawrence, KS 66045-7505)
FT-53500-05
Summer Stipends
Research Programs
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[Grant products][Media coverage]
Totals:
$5,000 (approved)
$5,000 (awarded)
Grant period:
5/1/2005 – 7/31/2005
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The Center at the Periphery: Eccentric Identity in Contemporary Russian Writing
This five-chapter book project addresses symbolic geographies and identity in contemporary Russian writing culture. It examines the process of cultural regeneration in post-Soviet Russia and emerging articulations of identity that move beyond the traumas of the post-Soviet movement. I have found a pattern of movement away from the old center of Soviet ideology in Moscow to "peripheral" symbolic-geographical spaces that free the writer to prove alternate writing forms and articulations of identity. In Summer 2005 I will focus on the novel, "Chapaev and Emptiness" ("Chapaev i pustota," 1996), by Viktor Pelevin, his quarrel with globalization, and his interest in Buddhism and East Asia as an alternate geographical locus of the mind.
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